Category Archives: 2015 Book Challenge

It’s been almost 2 months since I last posted any reviews, and I just haven’t made the time, despite having watched quite a few movies and having read some great books. I’ll just blame my absence on all the research papers that I grade in between the reading and watching.

So, briefly, here are some of my recent favorites:

Reading Challenge #3: A Book with a Number in the Title: Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

A dystopian novel that has been nominated for the Clarke Award (the British Award for sci-fi books). The novel begins on the night that a terrible flu begins to wipe out the population, and the novel moves back and forth between different characters’ perspectives and the timeline of the apocalypse–from several years before all the way up until 20 years post-flu pandemic.

Mandel creates a fascinating cast of characters: a medic who tries to save a famous actor who collapses on-stage during a performance of King Lear; that actor’s best friend and ex-wives both pre- and post-apocalypse; a young actor on stage who becomes part of a traveling theatre/musical group; a “prophet” who kidnaps and threatens various members of the group. And all the narrative centers around the interconnectedness of the characters as well as a futuristic, sci-fi comic book called Station Eleven.

This book is wonderful. It contains so much that I love about postapocalyptic stories: what happened on the First Night, how people survive, the effects of such a harsh reality on both individual and community psyches. But it is, ultimately, a story about people with the apocalypse as a backdrop, and it is very effectively done.

Book Challenge #14: A Book Recommended by a Friend: Oryx & Crake, Margaret Atwood

I read this book and Station Eleven in the same week, back in February. Two very different postapocalyptic novels by Canadian women. That’s what I get for lamenting that dystopian novels just haven’t satisfied me lately: I manage to read two really stellar ones back to back!

My friend Tyler and I both love books, but until recently, we didn’t actually like very many of the same books. But one that we both loved was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a brilliant, searing, feminist dystopian novel, and the first winner of the Clarke Award. So when Tyler loved Oryx & Crake, I tracked down a copy and started reading.

Oryx & Crake is the first book in a series called the MaddAddam trilogy. I have since read the sequel, called The Year of the Flood, and will soon get to MaddAddam to conclude the trilogy. These books focus on what happens when a society gives all its power to the corporations, when we become so focused on having everything better, cheaper, faster. The books are far more complex than what I could possibly summarize here, and there’s a strong understanding that everyone is in some way complicit in allowing a huge tragedy to happen. Margaret Atwood’s work is prescient and haunting, and I’m thankful when fiction can make me consider the world more critically.

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I’ve watched a lot of movies, too (many while grading papers so that I feel less guilty–it’s the plight of the English teacher, I’m afraid). So here’s a very, very quick review of some of the best, even if they didn’t fulfill a challenge:

Boyhood, dir. Richard Linklater

I wanted this to win Best Picture at the Oscars, but I’m at the very least grateful Patricia Arquette took home the Best Supporting Actress award. I admire, first of all, the dedication that it takes to make a film over 12 years. This movie felt like flipping through a scrapbook of a person’s life or reading a series of journal entries. At the end, you’ve seen some important and seemingly unimportant moments in a life, but when they’re all considered together, the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. We get a boy growing up, but the development of his parents and the characters around him is just as fascinating to watch. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s moving and thought-provoking and has stayed with me.

Whiplash, dir. Damien Chazelle

No lie: I’ll probably never watch this again. It was painful. I love my students, and to watch a movie about a teacher who berates, belittles, and damages his students hurt a lot. However, this movie has some of the best acting I’ve seen this year; J. K. Simmons earned every bit of that Best Supporting Actor award, and Miles Teller matches him pace for pace. I can’t wait to see how Teller continues to develop as an actor. And as painful as this movie was to watch, it was incredibly effective at raising the question of How far is too far? and Does the end justify the means? Do we celebrate this teacher for demanding (and receiving excellence), or do we punish him for his methods?

If you can’t handle the whole movie (which is likely to happen if you are a deeply caring person, especially one who teaches), then at least find the last scene in the movie, when Teller and Simmons go head-to-head in one of the best cinematic endings I’ve ever seen.

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Ideally, I would have been grading more of those research papers instead of posting this on my blog. However, one thing I’ve already realized about these book and movie challenges is that stories are hugely important to me. If I don’t make time to read and watch movies, I feel myself losing focus, getting angry and discouraged about life. After watching Boyhood, I had a conversation with a friend about how strange it felt that most of the things that I care about most in life are fictional stories. And there have certainly been times when I’ve privileged and sought out fictional stories as a replacement for stories in my own life. But when I’ve sought out great, well-crafted stories and I’ve found others who appreciate those some stories, my real life becomes fuller and richer. In the past year or so, I’ve developed solid relationships with people who also appreciate stories, and our connection transcends what we see on a page or screen.

So for the next few hours, I’m going to go watch another version of Beauty and the Beast with my friends who love fairy tales, and then I’m going to have dinner with my small group friends, in which we’ll talk about life, but also probably about movies at some point. And I’ll text a few friends in the meantime about a movie I watched last night and a book I’m currently reading.

And eventually, the papers will end up graded, but I’ll be a better person for having taken the time off to rest and appreciate a world outside of the job that I devote too much time to and the expectations that are placed upon me.

More books for the challenge. I’ve completed 6 out of the 35 and read 11 books total this year so far!

Book Challenge #9: A Short Story Collection

Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, Margaret Atwood

This book was released last year, and I was thrilled to read a short story collection from Margaret Atwood. Until this, I had only read (and loved and respected) The Handmaid’s Tale (although I’m now over halfway through Oryx & Crake).

This collection is, for the most part, thematically addressing aging although in a wonderful variety of ways. The first three stories are interconnected, following a group of writers who lived and wrote together in the 1960s folk-era NYC. At some point, each character has to confront the role that those early years in New York played in who they became later. It felt like I was sort of reading about some of the people who could have been in the lovely, but dark, Coen Brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis.

But other stories also addressed aging in fantastic ways. My favorite, above all, was the very last story, called “Torch the Dusties.” The protagonist is an elderly woman who lives in a nursing home; she has an eye disease called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which her blindness causes her to hallucinate tiny people who dance around. That fact alone begins to blur the line between fiction and reality. But then the residents in the home realize that someone is picketing and blocking the entrances into the facility, a group who believe that the elderly are using up all the resources and should be left to die. The situation worsens, and finally, the residents are alone in the home, with no food and no assistance or medication. It’s what I love about Atwood the most: a hauntingly relevant dystopian setting that gave me chills. I love dystopia, and no one does dystopia like Atwood. This collection was marvelous, even for a reader in her 20s who hasn’t yet begun to really consider the aging process.

Book Challenge #33: A book I started but never finished

I Never Had It Made, Jackie Robinson and Alfred Duckett

This book was on sale on the Nook last summer, and I started it in July after finishing Mariano Rivera’s The Closer, and I was so desperate for more baseball. I made the mistake of starting, however, while teaching summer school, so I stalled out after about 75 pages and finally started reading again in late December. I read the last 160 pages, however, in the last few days. Somehow, I was just as riveted at his life post-baseball as I was about his historic career with the Dodgers.

This book is one of the most authentically straightforward books I’ve ever read. It’s not the easiest book to read in that sense as I sometimes felt like someone was sitting in front of me, staring straight at me, and speaking with an uncomfortable level of candidness. Once I got used to the writing style, however, I found this autobiography to be refreshingly honest with more emotional depth than I imagined.

So many aspects of Jackie Robinson’s career are covered here: his close relationship with Branch Rickey, his tense relationship with some of his teammates, his decision to retire from baseball at the same time as he was traded to the Giants. But there was so much here that was unexpected: I didn’t realize how powerful politically Jackie Robinson became in the years after baseball. I never would have guessed his strong ties to the Republican Party and his role as NY Governor Rockefeller’s assistant. I had no idea about his roles in the various businesses and banks, either.

And I didn’t know the story of his oldest son, Jackie, Jr., who served in Vietnam, where he established a drug addiction that followed him back to the States. He was arrested and spent several years getting cleaned up in rehab and beginning to work with youth and addicts in a beautiful, powerful way before dying in a car accident at the age of 24. The last chapters of the autobiography, in which Jackie Robinson talks about his relationship with his oldest son and his family’s grief are beautifully written and devastating and a powerful testament to the love of family.

And Jackie Robinson’s work in the black community and fighting for the rights of blacks in America is, I think, his most notable legacy. His voice, speaking out against injustice and for his people, is strong and clear and inspiring.

A glimpse into just a few months of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life during the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of lessening the restrictions and difficulties of the African-American vote. It’s incredibly difficult to believe that these events happened just 50 years ago. My parents and a lot of other people I know were alive then. And while African-Americans legally had the right to vote, it was almost impossible due to voting taxes imposed for all the years in which they weren’t registered or the voucher system in which they had to have the recommendation of another voter to be allowed to register. This movie did an excellent job, I think, of portraying what those difficulties were like. It’s never enough just to say that something is allowed or that a particular group of people has a kind of freedom that they didn’t have before. Systemic racism is still an issue, and I appreciated the portrayal of this hugely important event. I think David Oyelowo was remarkable as MLK, and seeing other Civil Rights leaders, like a very young, college-aged John Lewis was awesome as well. I’m glad this movie was nominated for Best Picture; it’s definitely deserving, but I’m sad that Ava DuVernay missed out on the nomination for Best Director. She would have been the first African-American female to receive that nomination.

Movie Challenge #7: A Wes Anderson Film: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Since I saw (and LOVED) The Grand Budapest Hotel, I’ve been meaning to watch everything else Wes Anderson has ever made. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long. This is the first movie I’ve watched of his since it seemed to be the easiest to track down from the public library, and it is so delightful. A stop-motion animated version of a Roald Dahl book, this story is about a fox couple voiced by George Clooney and Meryl Streep. It’s cute and funny and quirky and lovely.

Book Challenge #4: A book Written by Someone under the Age of 30

The DUFF (Designated Ugly Fat Friend), Kody Keplinger

This book is being made into a movie, which is the challenge that I had originally planned it for. I was also really intrigued by the concept/title. But once I started reading, I wondered about the age of the author because, honestly, the writing felt similar to the stuff I had written in high school. And, sure enough, Kody Keplinger wrote this novel as a senior in high school. This was published in 2010, and she’s published several more books since then, so it would be interesting to see how her craft has improved. Knowing her age, I was a bit more forgiving of this book, but some aspects were still problematic.

Bianca, the main character, has an encounter at a teen club with the hottest guy in her grade, Wesley. He hits on her because he tells her she’s the DUFF, and her hot friends will appreciate that he’s paying attention to their Designated Ugly Fat Friend. She dumps her Coke on him, but somehow also kisses him, and so begins their “friends with benefits” relationship. She falls in love with him, even knowing that she’s just a hookup, but of course, because this is a high school romance, he falls in love with her, too. Everything ends nice and neat, including Bianca’s relationship with the guy she’d been crushing on for three years because, surprise, he’s also in love with someone else.

Ugh, why did I read this? I should have paid more attention to the reviews on GoodReads, but I was willing to give it a shot (especially as someone who has potentially been the DUFF before–I’m rather glad that term didn’t exist when I was in high schoool!).

Book Challenge #19: A Book Older than 100 Years

Kilmeny of the Orchard, L.M. Montgomery

Okay, so the physical book wasn’t 100 years old (in fact, I read the Kindle edition), but this book was published in 1910, which was my intention when I took on this challenge. This was a suggestion for book club although we ultimately read something else, but it’s been on my radar for awhile. This is one of Montgomery’s stand-alone novels for adults, and since I love Anne of Green Gables so, so much, I gave this one a shot. It’s really a novella about a recent college graduate who moves to a small town to substitute teach for a friend who has fallen ill. Eric, the teacher, is taking a walk one night and finds an orchard, where a beautiful woman is playing a violin. She gets frightened and runs, and he discovers that she’s a local woman who has been mute her whole life. He continues to visit the orchard, they fall in love, and he has to overcome the conflict of her unwillingness to marry him (because she fears she will be an embarrassment), and a few other issues. I liked this all right, but I didn’t love it like I love other Montgomery works. Maybe because it’s so short and there’s not much character development? At any rate, it’s a Montgomery book, and I’ll never regret reading anything of hers.

This is a 1947 French version of Beauty and the Beast directed by Jean Cocteau. It’s beautiful and creepy and fascinating and, obviously, follows the original story a bit more closely than the Disney version. Belle lives in big house in France with her father, two sisters, and a brother, whose friend Avenant is always hanging around because he is in love with Belle. The father is a shipping magnate who has lost his fortune when 3 of his ships go missing at sea. They are resigning themselves to a life of poverty when the news comes that one of the ships has returned. The father heads to the port city, only to discover that his debtors have already claimed all of the cargo, and they are just as poor as ever. On the way back home, he gets lost in the woods, finds the Beast’s enchanted castle, and explores a bit. The castle’s enchantments are weird: arms extend from the wall to light the candelabras, faces turn to look at you from the mantlepieces. The father never sees the Beast until he picks a rose to take back to Belle, the only reasonable request from his daughters. The Beast makes a deal with the father that either his daughter will take his place or the father will return within 3 days. Naturally, Belle takes his place and grows fonder of the Beast, etc.

The ending is the most interesting part of the story. When Belle returns to the castle and finds the Beast nearly dead from grief, he transforms into his human character–with the face of the friend Avenant who was in love with Belle! Avenant and Belle’s brother Ludovic had been attempting to break into the building where all the Beast’s wealth was kept, and in the process, a statue who may have been a conduit of the goddess Diana comes to life and kills Avenant, who transforms into a Beast just as the original Beast was transforming. The original Beast’s new human form had a much better haircut than Avenant, did, and was far more attractive that that animated version from Disney. When Rebecca and I watched the movie, we couldn’t decide if the Beast just looked like Avenant or if he actually was some kind of body-snatcher. But either way, it’s an interesting choice for the transformation.

Movie Challenge #14: A Movie Recommend by a Friend Who Loves Movies: The Fountain

Two friends–Bryce and Rebecca, with whom I actually watched the movie–recommended this to me in the past few months. The Fountain is directed by Darren Aronofsky and stars Hugh Jackman (Tommy) and Rachel Weisz (Izzie), who play several different characters throughout the movie. In the present time, Tommy and Izzie are married. Izzie is dying of cancer, and Tommy is trying to find a cure for cancer through experimental drugs and surgery on primates. In the past (around 1500), Izzie is actually the Spanish queen Isabella, and Tommy is Tomas, a Spanish explorer. Isabella sends Tomas on a quest to find the Fountain of Youth, which is contained within the Tree of Life somewhere in the Mayan rainforest. And in the future (around 2500), Tommy is guarding the Tree of Life within a spherical space ship heading toward a nebula. He is haunted by memories (I think?) of Izzie.

I don’t know that I could actually write a summary that fully explains how captivating this movie is. First of all, the cinematography is brilliant. The images of the spaceship and the nebula and the Tree in the forest are some of the most beautiful images I’ve ever seen on film. And Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz give such emotionally captivating performances with very few supporting actors to aid them. This is a movie that I’m going to have to watch many more times to even wrap my brain around some of the ideas of death and life, of reincarnation. ‘

Book Challenge #1: A Book Longer than 500 Pages: Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin

I don’t even know what to say about this book. There are honestly too many words for me to say about how beautiful and lovely and profound this book is. Back in November, my book club chose this for our January pick, on the premise that, since we wouldn’t be discussing a book in December because of Christmas, we would have 2 months to read Winter’s Tale, which clocks in at 748 pages.

I only need 8 days to read it. It was that good.

The book was made into a movie starring Colin Farrell that we’ll be watching at our book club meeting this weekend, but I can’t even imagine how the movie could convey even a fraction of the story. It’s the story of Peter Lake, a professional burglar, and Beverly Penn, who is dying of consumption in the early part of the 20th century. But that’s not even 100 pages of the book, I don’t think. The book spans a century of New York City life and is as much a love story about the city as it is about Peter and Beverly, or Hardesty and Virginia, or any of the other characters in the story. There’s a massive street gang led by a delightful fellow named Pearly Soames; there’s a group of Indian-like people called the Baymen who raise Peter Lake; there’s a magnificent place called the Lake of the Coheeries that is magical and weird; there’s a bridge-builder named Jackson Meade and his workers Rev. Mootfowl and Mr. Cecil Wooley. There’s a magical cloud wall that transforms everything and there’s a concept of reincarnation that I’m still working around in my brain.

There’s a bit of Dickens here, in the character names and the descriptions of New York as an industrialized city and the discussion of the weird orphanage where Peter Lake grows up. There are strong elements of magical realism very reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There’s a love for place that I’ve really only seen in Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of Walden Pond.

This is the perfect winter book. I’m going to buy a physical copy of my own someday on the off-chance I’m ever snowbound and need to read a book that won’t make me hate snow and winter. Also, I will be reading this again, I’m sure. Every page of those 748 had some grand treasure, and this quickly became one of my new favorite books.

Thank God for Christmas break and a new apartment with no internet. No, really. I have done so much reading and movie-watching, and it’s wonderful!

Book Challenge #13: Read a book by an author I love that I haven’t read yet

The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is, far and away, one of my favorite authors. I had read the first issue of The Sandman years ago, and I’ve owned the trade paperback of volume 1 but had never gotten around to reading it. Before Gaiman became famous for his novels and works of short fiction and episode-writing for Doctor Who and his marriage to Amanda Palmer, he made his name known in the comic book world with this critically-acclaimed series.

In Vol. 1, a man named Roderick Burgess acquires a grimoire that should enable him to capture Death. Instead, he ensnares Death’s little brother Dream (also known as Morpheus), whom he imprisons for about 70 years. When Dream is captured, he is no longer reigning over the dream and nightmare realms, and of course things go horribly awry.

When Roderick’s son Alex finally releases Dream, he immediately punishes Alex and then goes on a quest for his tools. Dream teams up with John Constantine to find a small, but powerful, bag of sand. He ventures to hell to fight a demon in order to get his helmet back. And, with a little help from old members of the Justice League of America, he finds Doctor Destiny, who has used Dream’s ruby amulet to take control of the dreamworld and attempt to bring about the apocalypse. (Also, Morpheus is kind of attractive in that 80s, early-Neil Gaiman, comic-book sort of way.)

The editor, in the introduction to vol. 1, states that this is the weakest of the collected volumes, that Gaiman was still trying to find his voice. But I still found it wonderful. It’s almost like there’s this band that you’ve loved for years, and you discover their unreleased EP that they recorded in someone’s garage, and you still think it’s wonderful. This volume of the comics is really, really good, and I know Gaiman’s voice well enough to hear it in the voices of Morpheus and his sister Death. And I’m eager to get my hands on the rest of the series now.

Movie Challenge #2: Watch a movie made more than 50 years ago

Take Me Out to the Ballgame(1949)

I found this on sale at B&N a year or so ago, and I’m so glad I did. It’s a musical about baseball! Frank Sinatra plays a young second baseman to Gene Kelly’s veteran shortstop on a championship baseball team in the early 1900s. In the off-season, Sinatra & Kelly do vaudeville acts, and the movie begins when they’re late for spring training in Florida. Shortly after they arrive, the teams learns that the old owner has passed away and left the team to a distant relative who wants to see the team. They immediately assume it will be an old, fat man who thinks he knows more about the game of baseball than they do. Instead, the new owner is a beautiful woman, played by Esther Williams. She immediately clashes with Gene Kelly, and young Frank immediately falls in love with her but has no game, so he doesn’t no how to talk to her about anything other than baseball.

There’s baseball and romance and bad guys betting on the game of baseball and a clambake. It’s really delightful. My friends who love musicals would love it. Also, Frank Sinatra is a skinny, young guy who looks absolutely adorable in his team sweater.